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Elaine Naylor’s Frontier Boosters is a compelling social history of urbanization and economic development in the nineteenth-century American West. Focusing on Port Townsend, Washington and the surrounding Puget Sound region, she examines “boosterism” and the dynamics of class and race in frontier settlement. The following is an excerpt.
On the morning of March 4, 1891, broadsides appeared throughout Port Townsend, Washington, a seaport on Puget Sound and the largest town in Jefferson County.
“Let everybody who has the interest of Port Townsend at heart attend … a public meeting [to] repudiate false reports … now being circulated … of the immorality of this place.”
By 8:00 in the evening, the Red Men’s Hall was crowded to overflowing with “all classes of society [indignant at the] stigma … placed on the fair fame of [their] city” and eager to refute the “notorious libel” that gambling was a respectable activity in Port Townsend.
This meeting was Jefferson County’s response to a political crisis, one which many residents believed was a threat to county development because it could damage the community’s reputation with outsiders. In February 1891, Port Townsend attorney Morris B. Sachs, recently elected district court judge, was charged by the state legislature with “misbehavior, malfeasance and delinquency in office” for frequently gambling in public. Judge Sachs did not deny his gambling; his defense was to claim that such a pursuit was a “fashionable and honorable passtime [sic] in Port Townsend [and that] some of the ‘leading business men’ … of the city frequently gamble[d].”
In the end, Sachs retained his office, acquitted by a narrow margin in the State Senate, because a majority of state senators thought removal was too high a price to pay for such “misbehavior.” However, it was not Sachs’s gambling per se, but rather his assertion that gambling was an acceptable, popular recreation in Port Townsend that caused so much concern to townspeople. His claim was perceived to threaten the county’s reputation, which in turn endangered its economic development, a project dear to the hearts of residents since such development promised individuals economic opportunity. According to the Leader, “unless some steps are at once taken … a feeling of prejudice against Port Townsend in the minds of all respectable people throughout the United States” would arise. Already the town was “jestingly spoken of as a place where one of the requisites of admission to society is skill at playing faro.” Port Townsendites needed to unite in “some expression of popular sentiment … without delay” in order to protect the future of Jefferson County.
Responding to the Leader’s call, residents of Port Townsend and the surrounding countryside assembled that evening and passed a series of resolutions condemning Judge Sachs. Declaring that the “community has been falsely stigmatized as a gambling community,” they decried the “impression create[d] abroad” that the community’s “citizens are devoid of moral character.” Although it was unpleasant for individuals to be so characterized, what was even worse was that this should “degrade the name of our city in the eyes of the world.” They asked “fellow citizens abroad to judge us not by the opinions of [those who would] further their own ends by casting a black cloud of universal immorality over … our fair commonwealth.”
Why was this incident so important that it elicited a spirited public response? The answer lies in the concern many nineteenth-century residents had about Jefferson County’s economic future. Because residents feared that Sachs’s portrayal of the county would turn potential immigrants and investors to other, supposedly more respectable communities, an effective rebuttal was perceived to be imperative. Thus the “interest” the Leader hoped to find in the hearts of residents was the county’s economic development, or boosterism.
Jefferson County boosterism, while unique in some local particulars, was not unusual. Boosterism – the thinking about, desire for, and/or the promotional efforts to accomplish development – was very much a phenomenon of the nineteenth century, when the acquisition of immense reaches of continental land by the United States encouraged the movement of increasingly larger numbers of people westward, and boosterist thinking was common currency. By the 1840s and continuing through the nineteenth century, booster literature was widely read, and boosters’ theories of economic growth “dominated nineteenth- century thinking about frontier development.”
By its very nature, nineteenth-century frontier boosterism was an interaction between reality and ideas, as much an exercise of the imagination as it was a practical program for development. Boosters expressed “what many Americans believed – or wanted to believe – about … the United States and its Great West”: that expansion westward was inevitable and that the development of the frontier West’s resources would naturally provide economic opportunity and social mobility unavailable in more settled regions, to those willing to participate in that development. Such sanguinity was characteristic of frontier boosterism. Given American perceptions that the West was an undeveloped wilderness, Americans likened the frontier to a nearly empty canvas awaiting completion. If natural resources and transportation routes had been sketched in, presumably by the Creator, it was up to boosters and their supporters to finish the picture: to imagine and then to create the future. Once the canvas was largely filled, that is, once significant development had occurred, development thinking changed radically. Post-frontier boosterism was more pragmatic and focused on what could be done with circumstances as they were, rather than as imagined.
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